04.13.23: Notes on Denzel Curry
I'm several years older than the South Florida rapper, and yet I feel like I've grown up with him.
I met Denzel Curry at a diner in Times Square several years ago and picked his brain about the sights and sounds of South Florida.
He’s a thoughtful guy and an understated figure at the overlap of various trends and influences in hip-hop. Naturally his music is quite stormy. And yet: It feel somewhat reductive saying this, but essentially, Denzel Curry is a better refined version of what Lupe Fiasco was advancing a bit more clumsily — to brilliant effect only occasionally — for a long time in earlier decades: a sort of high-low, old-new hip-hop ecclectism with weebish touchpoints and classically woke anxieties.
It’s all very playful even at its very starkest. It’s irresistible, even when (I think) I’m not in the mood for it.
I recall listening to Curry’s debut album, Nostalgic 64, and its stickiest hooks, on “Parents” in particular, until I was utterly sick of that shit, nearly a decade ago, around the time I got into music criticism for a living. With time Denzel Curry has become a more sosphisticated musician, of course — he was 18 when he released Nostalgic 64 — but in his essential characteristics, I’d say, he hasn’t aged a day.
(I certainly have. I’m married, and I ride around Cleveland blasting Denzel Curry but also Miranda Lambert in a Mini Countryman, for chrissakes.)
Some rappers — some rockers and pop stars, too — don’t age quite right. But I like to think I’ll still be listening to Denzel Curry a decade from now, as he further matures into endless, ageless rebellion, à la Saul Williams, and helps us cope, at least attitudinally, with life under Skynet or whatever.